EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: MAGGIE STIEFVATER

Maggie Stiefvater’s SHIVER May Turn Out to Be Another Twilight or Harry Potter Franchise

www.iesb.net: Maggie Stiefvater always knew that she was going to be a professional author, but she never could have imagined the level of success that she’s already experiencing in her career.

Her debut novel, Lament, is about a 16-year-old girl who falls in love with a boy that turns out to be a soulless faerie assassin that’s supposed to kill her. Her second best-selling novel, Shiver, is a Young Adult love story about Grace, who has always loved the wolves behind her house, and Sam, a boy who has to become a wolf, every winter. Her most recent novel, Ballad, is a stand-alone sequel about deadly faerie muses, in the same world as Lament. And, she is contractually booked to keep writing novels through 2013.

With the popularity of such book-to-film adaptations as Harry Potter and the Twilight series, it’s no surprise that Unique Features, headed by Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, have already acquired the rights to her werewolf story Shiver, and its two sequels, Linger (August 2010) and Forever, which they will bring to Warner Bros. under their first-look deal with the studio.

In this exclusive interview, Maggie Stiefvater talked to IESB about what it’s like to have everything she ever dreamed of, as a kid, coming true.

IESB: Could you ever have imagined how successful you’d become with Shiver? Does that success help you feel more confident, as a writer, or does it just create more pressure?

Maggie: I really believe that confidence is something that you have to have inside yourself, apart from what it is that you do. Confidence means that you think that you can find the solution to the problem, not that you already have all of the solutions. So, I’d like to think that nothing that’s happened along the way has actually changed my level of confidence, especially since you can always get a bad review, but I will say that about 50 pages into Shiver, I thought, “This is the best thing I have ever written.” And then, when I got to the end of it and finished it up, and wrote the last line, I thought, “This could be way bigger than Lament. It’s way more commercial.” I was really hopeful.

I have to read this book, it sounds really interesting. What do you think of this interview? Have you read Shiver? And remember that OBS YA Book Club for November is Shiver, so get your copy and join us!